St. George
Second Officer Winifred Wimsey's big brother, though neither of them yet knows the other frequents Xanadu. He got all the height, and she got all the sense. I am a satellite, I'm out of control St. George is thirty years old-- six feet tall, blond, grey-eyed, and generally too handsome for his own good. He is in excellent physical health, with the trifling exception that one side of him was blasted with shrapnel several months ago when his RAF base was attacked. He was rather lucky, as shrapnel victims go, that the damage was relatively superficial-- but there was a lot of it, and a lot more cutting immediately afterwards to get all the bits back out, so recovery is going very slowly and will never be complete. He can walk now, with a cane and for short distances, and it gets painful quickly-- but he still prefers it to having to go out in public in the wheelchair he uses at home. A cane, he can at least pretend (not very convincingly) is a fashion accessory. And he is a man concerned with fashion; despite living currently in a small village that is not precisely a Place To Be Seen, he always dresses impeccably. It's a habit St. George finds oddly comforting. (He also wears a wedding ring, but he doesn't talk about his wife much, only because after six and a half years of marriage talking about her still turns him into a goopy sentimental idiot and it's really just embarrassing for everyone around him.) I'm a shooting star leaping through the skies passing by like Lady Godiva Gerald Wimsey, styled Viscount St. George, more familiarly known as Captain Gerald Viscount St. George, St. George, Gerald, Jerry, Jerrykins, Pickled Gherkins, or "that fool boy of Denver's," until recently a Captain in the Royal Air Force-- born July 22, 1914, less than a week before the beginning of World War I. His father is the sixteenth Duke of Denver, his mother is an utter horror of upright morals and good taste, and his aunts and uncles are all terribly exciting people; he also has a younger sister, Winifred, who is not terribly exciting at all but quite happy that way. St. George had just the comfortable, conventional upbringing one would expect for the eldest son of a duke; he was sent to prep school, then to Eton, and then to Christ Church College at Oxford, where-- having no particular academic inclinations-- he managed somehow to scrape out a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. However, the vast majority of his time was spent on more enriching pursuits like polo, women, accruing substantial gambling debts, and generally worrying the hell out of his family-- again, perfectly traditional for a man of his upbringing. St. George may have resented his parents' (extremely relative) strictness about alotting him money, but he has never really had much of a desire to occupy any social position than the one he holds. (Which is, after all, a very comfortable one.) In short: he does possess a brain and a sense of responsibility, but has no interest in exercising either unless absolutely necessary. Common sense, however, is too much to hope for and always has been. I'm a rocket ship on my way to Mars In 1934, St. George made a bet with a friend regarding getting into St. Hugh's College at a highly uncivilized hour of the morning, and was caught by one of the students-- a girl named Hilary Thorpe, who happened to be acquainted with St. George's uncle. Miss Thorpe found the situation hilarious, luckily, and chose not to report him to any authority figures-- and since she also happened to be pretty, he repaid the favor by asking her to dinner. The date went terribly. Luckily, a year later they tried again by way of celebrating their successful escape from university, and this time it went too well; instead of the more casual relationship St. George and Hilary had both been hoping for, they fell in love. Hilary's refusal to marry anyone, even the man she loved, meshed badly with his familial obligation to marry and produce heirs whether it was to a woman he loved or not-- but St. George wasn't in any particular hurry to fulfill that obligation anyway, so they went on quite happily involved but unmarried for nearly three years. (Which was a very long time, in the 1930s.) In 1938, the Duchess finally bullied Hilary into either leaving St. George or marrying him; she decided to propose, St. George accepted, and they tried their very best to get used to the idea out of necessity. Before they could, however, there was another war, and everything went to hell, and St. George did his duty and joined the RAF. And even if Hilary could resign herself to being St. George's wife, she couldn't resign herself to being the sort of military wife who sat at home and waited for the bad news-- and by the summer of 1940 a whole lot of RAF wives were getting bad news. So she left-- not their marriage but the country, accepting her newspaper's offer to send her to Vichy as a foreign correspondent-- and they didn't see much of each other for a long time; St. George was sent out to north Africa, eventually, and it was near-impossible for them both to arrange leave in the same places at the same time. And so matters remained for nearly four years, until in spring 1944 St. George's base was bombed and he was critically injured and rushed to a field hospital. A week later, when he came back to his senses somewhat, he found his wife there with him-- she had up and transferred herself to Algiers without waiting for her editor's opinion, and she stayed there with him for a few more weeks until he was hanging together well enough for them to travel back to Britain. He's living alone again, right now; Hilary reopened her late parents' house in the only-rarely-exciting village of Fenchurch St. Paul for St. George to live in quietly while he recovers, since he really doesn't feel up to coping with his mother on top of everything else, but she's been sent back out to somewhere on the Front. St. George knows she'll come back if he really desperately needs her too, and Hilary knows he's all right with her going somewhere else and doing her job in the meantime, which has helped them both be much more comfortable with the whole idea of being married-- but he's trying all the same not to need her too badly for the next little while. (Except that feelings don't actually work that way.) Like a tiger, defying the laws of gravity St. George recently wandered into Xanadu through the basement of the old village church, and can be found there often, being handsome and charming. Which is, after all, what he does best. I don't want to stop at all When St. George was four, it was 1918, and his uncle Peter came home from the first World War so twisted around with shellshock that it took months for him to even be able to tell reliably that he was home. Though Lord Peter turned out to be one of St. George's greatest heroes, this was still St. George's first experience of him-- and one of his first memories of anything ever, honestly. He's never told anyone he remembers seeing Lord Peter in that state, and with a determined effort he's nearly forgotten. Nearly. Not enough that he doesn't worry he might yet end up the same. For now, his grasp on reality is workably good, but he does suffer from as-yet-untreated depression and shellshock-- what would now be referred to as PTSD-- a condition becoming quite common, though its frequency doesn't make it any less miserable for anyone concerned. St. George sleeps poorly, has nightmares when he does sleep, and reacts poorly sometimes to sudden loud noises and always to sudden bright lights-- he also suffers from flashbacks, and while they're brief enough that he can usually disguise them in company, they are deeply fucking unpleasant. As flashbacks are. He feels lost and tired and old, a lot of the time, which is a feeling he really hates in himself; he worries he's let down his family and country by being invalided out of the Air Force, but worries just as much about the way his horde of young male cousins hero-worships him for it. And he is deeply bitter and frustrated at having gone in an instant from being able to fly to barely being able to walk. (Every so often, when he wakes up alone in the middle of the night, his first thought is not of Hilary being out of the country but that he dreamt her up in the delirium following his injury and she never existed at all. But that, even more than all the rest of it, is something that he really feels should never be told to anyone.) Worst of all, somehow, St. George has never been someone who takes well to boredom-- and just because he can't imagine actually coping with city life or his family right now doesn't mean he's entirely happy in Fenchurch St. Paul, either. Not nearly enough happens there to distract him from brooding endlessly-- plus he misses Hilary horrendously, and living in the house and town where she grew up doesn't exactly help with that. With this, at least, visiting Xanadu is helping; it gives St. George an excuse to socialize as if things were normal without the added pressure of having to pretend for his family's sake that he himself is all right. Despite all of this, he still manages to cope quite cheerfully with socializing in Xanadu, and it should be made clear that to consider his near-perpetual good humor an act would be outright erroneous. Depression and all, he's always been one to get through difficulties on a laugh where he possibly can, and he thrives on socializing and excitement, especially the sort that doesn't involve explosions or death. His happiness at meeting people is quite unfeigned; there's just also a lot of unhappy he's trying not to show. I feel alive and the world it's turning inside out PB'd by Phillips Holmes. He belongs to himself, and I didn't write any Queen songs either, sadly. All these characters belong to the estate of Dorothy L. Sayers; only parts of the backstory are my own. Category:Characters Category:Living